C.M. Rosens's Blog, page 32

Sales and Serials ~ March Update

Greetings friends! I updated you in my newsletter but I haven’t done so here. Here are some things to tide you over until my next novel releases!

SMASHWORDS SALE NOW ON!

THE CROWS – $2.49 A cursed woman with 33 days to live and a lonely eldritch cannibal who can see the future form an unlikely, albeit twisted, friendship over their mutual obsession for a sentient house. Can their allegiance save her, or will it doom her forever?

THIRTEENTH – $2.49 An insanity-inducing playboy wants to cut ties with his family of eldritch horrors and live his best, messiest polyamorous life – but his little sister Katy is due to transform into a god who feasts on her family, and he’s on her List. Bad decisions ensue.

OVEREXPOSURE – $0.99 A short horrormance of obsession & addiction: a detail-orientated photographer becomes obsessed with a man whose face evades memory… When he realises the extent of her addiction to him, is it already too late?

FOLKLORE OF PAGHAM-ON-SEA – $0.00 [free] A collection of [fictional] folk tales and urban legends from the town setting of the novels, in prose and verse.
– child kidnap by the fae under the long barrows
– creepy tales of St Mark’s Eve
– the Punch & Judy man of Hangman’s Walk
– and more!

Exclusive Ko-Fi Serial

Want more? For £3 one-off donation you get 30 days access to all my supporter only posts on Ko-Fi, and this includes a slasher novella I’m playing with set in Fairwood House, Halloween 2020.

It’s called The Sussex Fretsaw Massacre and if you’re a monthly supporter you already have access with your tier! I’m posting it in its entirety, updates are Wednesdays and Saturdays through March around 12 noon GMT.

Podcast S02E21 ~ Thirteenth Finale Part 21

Welcome to the Final Episode of Eldritch Girl S02…

The last (and double-length!) episode of S02, in which the triad meet their Grandsire, Ricky finds some comfort, Wes makes a choice and gets some insurance, and Katy sets herself on a path she can’t come back from.

CW: graphic gore/violence, killing family, drug use, strong language, gruesome transformational body horror

listen now

“WHAT’S PAST IS PROLOGUE.” ― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

HERE WE GO with a double-length finale of my novel THIRTEENTH, now completely serialised on my podcast along with THE CROWS, which was S01. Both are roughly the same length and the audiobooks are at around 10hrs of runtime.

You can buy/borrow THE CROWS on audiobook right now, and THIRTEENTH will now be released as an audiobook later in the year!

What’s NewThe Crows Anniversary Hardback edition – with exclusive short story “Gerald”, a new town map by Dewi Hargreaves, and new cover design by Rebecca F. Kenney.
Limited Edition Book Boxes: get a signed, annotated copy of The Crows Anniversary Hardback, author notes on the whole book and writing process, and an exclusive book themed candle by Avalon Alchemy, only from my Ko-Fi Shop: £65.00 per box including worldwide shipping.
My new short novella, THE RELUCTANT HUSBAND has been published in an indie anthology, The Uncanny and the Dead. Grab your copy in eBook and Paperback now, and listen to the authors & editor discussing the anthology on my podcast!
Watch this space for the audiobook version of THIRTEENTH to be released now that the podcast series is complete!
NEW: exclusive to Ko-Fi supporters (one-off and monthly), the serialised short novella, THE SUSSEX FRETSAW MASSACRE, is being serialised on my Ko-Fi page through March 2022.
COMING SOON: THE DAY WE ATE GRANDAD , the third book in the Pagham-on-Sea series (Pendle Clan novels) is forthcoming, and I’m aiming to get it to beta readers in April, with a loose goal of publishing it in August/September 2022.

ELDRITCH GIRL will be returning for S03 and serialising this third novel in the Autumn/Fall!

Check back in to read more blog posts and updates, and sign up to my free newsletter in the meantime. There are also slots left to support me at the Eldritch Seeker supporter tier for £3 per month on Ko-Fi, where you’ll get access to a LOT of exclusive subscriber-only content, including in-character letters every month that imagine contemporary life for Carrie, Ricky, Wes et al through lockdown and Katy’s adventures at University. These aren’t exactly canon, but I’m having fun with them.

Thank you for listening!

Grab your illustrated copy of thirteenth now

The Uncanny and the Dead Anthology ~ Author Panel Interview

The Anthology ~ ed. Ezra Arndtlisten to the interview buy the EBOOKBuy The PaperbackInterview

CMR: hello, and welcome back to a very special episode of Eldritch Girl where we’ve got a number of interviewees today and they’re all authors from The Uncanny and The Dead anthology which is edited by Ezra Arndt which came out in January. So we’ve got Frank Rudiger Lopez and Allie Pino and Ezra Arndt, and myself, C. M. Rosens, I am in the anthology as well! Let’s start with Frank. Frank, would you like to introduce yourself.

FRL: Hello, I’m Frank, I’m a Brazilian historian, writer, researcher and podcaster, and I do many things! I work with science fiction and I’m currently doing my Masters, and I’m also writing fiction, because I clearly don’t do enough things.

CMR: Amazing. We’ve also got Allie Pino. Allie, would you like to introduce yourself.

AP: Hello and thank you for inviting me on to talk about The Uncanny and the Dead. My name is Allie, and I’m currently doing research at the University of Westminster on food, cultural memory and the Gothic. I am co-authoring A Gothic Cookbook, which is a book of recipes inspired by 13 Gothic novels.

CMR: And Ezra, the editor of the anthology who also has a story in it! Ezra, would you like to introduce yourself?

EA: Hi I’m Ezra Arndt and I write Gothic fiction. That’s where I’m at right now.

[Laughter]

CMR: Amazing. I’m going to keep that line in. So you guys each have a story in the anthology. Frank’s is The Dark Pursuit, so that’s written in American English with Brazilian conventions. There’s Allie’s story, Hide and Seek, which is a very short one and that’s in British English, mine is also in British English, and then there’s Ezra’s ‘The Field Devours’ in American English. I’m going to pick on you now Ezra to go first. Would you like to read a snippet from your story and introduce it to us, please?

EA: I guess the whole premise of the story is that this flesh eating cornfield stalks people. I didn’t come up with that pun. That was Hester, Hester Steel who also has a story in the anthology.

CMR: I thought I recognized that. That sounded like a Hester Steel pun.

EA: So, I guess, this is the, this is the first paragraph.

There’s this field in the dark. I can’t help it. I go into it. It calls to me. It sees me. It has no eyes, yet it sees me.

~ Ezra Arndt, The Field Devours

And that’s all I got.

CMR: I love that opening, it’s just so creepy! So it’s basically, every time the [main] character Lee turns the light out they end up in a cornfield that wants to eat them. That’s basically the premise, and it’s just yeah.  How did you come up with that? Where did that come from?

EA: I’ve always grown up around cornfields and then I had this sort of this vague idea for this story so years ago after watching part of Children of the Corn and I’m like well, why can’t the just the corn itself be eating people?? So that’s about where it came from.

CMR: I love it. It’s so good and it’s got such a – it’s got such a bitey ending as well, a bit of a bit of tragic love, in the middle and like.

EA: It’s definitely inspired by the Magnus Archives too.

CMR: Oh yes, yeah it’s got that it’s got a definite Magnus Archives vibe and, yeah, there’s a little bit of the Magnus Archives in the whole kind of premise as well right like it’s yeah I really enjoyed that because I love the Magnus Archives, so I was like, Oh, but it’s got this really cool twist that I didn’t quite see coming. And I was like oh. Oh okay you’re doing this, which I quite like.

Allie, you go next! Would you like to read a snippet from your story and just introduce it for us, please.

AP: The name of my story is Hide and Seek, and it’s about the ghost of a little boy trapped on a ship, part of which is displayed as an exhibit in a museum. Towards the end of the story, the ghost says:

No one looked for me, and silence settled in and hung uncomfortably on the echoes I could still hear around me. Strangely, I felt no pain or fear. I think I had simply slipped away, leaving no trace.

~ Allie Pino, Hide and Seek

CMR: Where did you get the idea for it from?

AP: Now, museums today are very different places to what they used to be. Before, they were showplaces of accumulated objects, and now, they are sites of interaction between personal and collective identities, and between memory and history. So my story aimed to raise the question, can an object allow one to re-experience something which happened in the past? When we walk into a museum and come close [to], or perhaps even touch an artefact, the symbol of a traumatic event, can its energy make itself heard, or can we simply forget, and never feel the need to understand events from a different perspective?

I suppose this story also wants to underline the importance of museums as spaces which contain and organise the existence of something, or perhaps someone, who lives on and can be connected to a specific place, where their bodies and actions [are] creating this [sic] strange repetitions and an oddness. The strength of their emotions of these memories, or ‘ghosts’, reaches out into the world, and creates something that goes beyond itself.

And so, through the image of this ghost boy, I wanted to explain how trauma repeats itself, and continues to speak out and make itself heard to those people who come into contact with this reorganisation of memory, and how they are affected and shaped by that energy.

CMR: Frank, last but not least, oh, I suppose I’m last, aren’t I because… [laughs] I should really be advertising my story too. But Frank, you can go next and then. Yeah. Frank, would you like to introduce your story.

FRL: So there’s a weird pursuit between a weird uncertain cosmic eldritch entity and the pursued, who’s uh well he’s fairly horrible but I won’t say much more than that, but I am going to read a short bit from the pursuer.

—Ah Damien still believing you can escape from us? Go, run, fly away as fast as you can. It matters little. It has been a long time since we have been up and about. How delightful that you raised us from slumber.

~ Frank Rudiger Lopes, The Dark Pursuit

CMR: Yeah So this is the eldritch horror entity, cosmic… yeah. I very much enjoyed your story, Frank. Where did you get the idea for it?

FRL: Essentially, it was from a very visual image of the Hollow Knight video game where there’s a particular area I suppose. It’s called the abyss, and there’s this weird void, energy thing. It’s complicated, but it was very striking as imagery as this sort of sentient black mass. And I was like oh this, I can play with this a bit, so I changed… I got a bit of that and created my own eldritch entity, and it was… I always find it cool to give them a voice, so I did, and they always they usually enjoying themselves, which is fitting, I think.

CMR: I love it. I think yeah that’s really, really cool. Okay, so. I also have – mine’s one of the longer ones, unfortunately, and it’s called The Reluctant Husband. If anyone has read The Crows, it’s a standalone prequel set in 1938 and it’s how Nathan Porter meets and marries the eldritch tea lady, Deirdre Wend. It’s basically about a human occultist who bites off a lot more than he can chew in his search for power and occult secrets and ends up in a very mundane situation, which is where the horror is, I think.

So this is an extract from my story in which Nathan has just been invited to Fairwood House and it’s his first time meeting Deirdre who is serving him tea and he’s recording everything in his diary so it’s retrospective account.

There is something about her that frightens me. 

The girl makes no sound. Her approach is entirely silent when she wishes it to be so, even when pushing a trolley laden with china. 

I encountered her in the smoking room at Fairwood on my second visit, last weekend. I doubt it has been used as a smoking room in Sir Jack’s day, for the furniture has all but gone from the room and what little remains is covered in dust sheets. I thought this would be a good place to read undisturbed, and was so engaged until the shadows lengthened in the room and a chill worked its way down my neck. 

The hairs on my nape stood to attention and I had the most curious primæval response. I spun around with a hoarse cry – to see no monster, but Deirdre in her apron and cap, standing in her stooped manner with a tea tray. She peered at me in a way that sent shivers up my spine, at once assessing and – there is only one way to describe it – eviscerating. I felt an acute sense of dread. 

She spoke. 

“Do you want a biscuit?”

~ C. M. Rosens, The Reluctant Husband

CMR: So I just love the Lovecraft mythos and that sort of thing and Lovecraft heroes are just so ridiculous to me and I don’t like them, and they’re generally quite unlikable and I’m sorry, but those stories really make me laugh, and they’re not supposed to make you laugh. I just find them really funny, and so I decided to write a kind of parody, I guess, like I Lovecraftian parody, pretty much everything I write is a Lovecraftian or is sending up Lovecraft in some way and, yes, so this is this is Nathan expecting something very dramatic and he uses words like stygian a lot and a lot of things are indescribable, but what he’s actually describing is like literally a chambermaid who serves him tea, and who is also an eldritch horror, but that’s the least horrifying thing about her. She’s awful as well. She makes him go and watch Errol Flynn in the cinema, and… yeah, so yeah so that’s my story.

The reluctant courtship of Deirdre Wend and some very gnarly body horror happens to him later on, and other characters, so yeah and so that’s our anthology! Just a tiny peek at some of the stories in there, and I thought we could just have an open chat time about our love of horror and spookiness, because this is the Spooky by Association anthology which is the umbrella that it’s under.

And it came out of our…

EA: Group chat!

CMR: writing group chat, yeah, with additional… You had an open call for stories.

EA: It started off as a joke, and then I was like wait.

CMR: People loved it, I think it was such a good idea we had such a lot of interest for it as well and yeah you worked really hard on this Ezra, so thank you so much for putting it together and Spooky by Association was the working title originally but it’s just a really good indie publishing name as well.

Yeah, why did you guys, um – where did your love of spookiness and horror come from? Allie, do you want to say something? Anybody else jump in.

AP: I have always loved spooky stories ever since I was a child, and I’ve always believed in ghosts and been thoroughly scared of them. The first story I wrote about ghosts that was published was called ‘The Strange Occurrences at Sunnywell Care Home’, for a collection of folk horror stories from Horrified [Magazine]. And I love this idea that horror kind of flourishes in the cracks between worlds and our memory of events. So, inexplicable things happen every day, and it’s that inexplicable element that lets in the darkness. And with folk, we have forests of gnarled trees, or perhaps ancient relics, or a well that can remind us of our fleeting existence, and all these surroundings watch over us and follow us, as we battle on a day-to-day basis with the memory of violence or a traumatic event. So as we age, these surroundings still also age with us, and then… they kind of swallow us up. So I love this idea that a ghost story can really be so many things depending on what your darkness is.

FRL: I, I have a weird relationship with horror and spookiness because it’s it was mostly non-existent for most of my life. And I sort of started to grow fond of it via podcasts and a lot of… a lot of different people who like horror and write horror and study horror, and mostly via Romancing the Gothic and then meeting you folks.

And then, I was like okay I can actually enjoy it and really like reading horror, or at least some types of horror, and yours very much fits that small box. But I – and then I started to discover I can play with this too, because I work with Sci-Fi a lot of the time, and I like the Weird stuff, so I’m like Okay, I can bring that in too, and then, just like playing with cosmic stuff and weird feelings and just strange things, odd things happening, and then, that sense of the unnerving is something I really enjoy. So yeah. And weird and super powerful entities who just have a great time.

So I guess for me it’s… my love of horror is very recent, but it’s quite a lot of things, but it’s mostly to write this sense of like, I don’t know. I guess powerlessness or power or just weird things going on and ‘oh this shouldn’t be the case, oh no. Yeah I think that’s how I feel about writing or thinking [about] spooky stuff.

CMR: yeah I can I can see that a satellite because your podcast the Left Page is very much about class dynamics and power balances in fiction, and that kind of thing, so I can kind of see where you’re- where you’re coming from when you’re writing, and why power imbalances and that kind of dynamic is a fun one for you to play with, because you’re playing with it in a different kind of medium and a different vehicle, so yeah that makes that makes sense that’s really cool.

And Ezra, you used to write a lot of fantasy?

EA: I used to write a lot of fantasy but they always had like dark fantasy undertones, and I wrote that for the longest time, I was introduced… I grew up on the original Grimm Brothers fairy tales and the ones that those were inspired by, and those are like pretty grizzly most of the time. I loved them. But I didn’t really sort of embrace that until like later on, and then I read Flowers in the Attic at too young of [an] age. And that had the Gothic vibes, then I sort of started to combine those two things in my writing and then. Here we are.

CMR: Yeah, because you don’t tend to…You don’t watch many slashers, like you’re not, you know, a big slasher person,

EA: No. No.

CMR: But this story is quite gory and a lot of the stuff you write is quite gory your kind of – your brand is very much like there’s cannibalism somewhere, or like, somebody’s being eaten by something. How does that work?

[laughter]

EA: I guess because I can read and write it, but I just can’t watch it. It’s like once I get the visual in my head, like an actual visual with people at quote unquote “real things” happening, and like once when it starts to become more vivid that’s where I started having trouble with it, but I can listen to it, I can read it, I can write it, but just… no.

I think the scariest thing I could watch was probably a Del Toro.

CMR: But I introduced you to No One Lives.

EA: I know. That was an event.

CMR: Drawing you into the slasher realm with me… No, I’m very much the same actually. I think one of the worst things I’ve ever seen was Colour out of Space with Nick Cage, which is based on the Lovecraft story and it’s just the body horror and the slow changing of the characters in it, because they’re drinking the water and it’s so insidious.

And they’re eating fruit that has you know kind of grown out of the water that’s contaminated with this alien thing that is now changing them and changing the alpacas and like. [makes disgusted sound] I made the mistake of watch– I thought I’d watch it in the daytime but I made the mistake of watching at lunchtime, I was trying to eat. And I was just that is the one that yeah yeah just I was like oh no. I just couldn’t watch it, it was awful.

And it’s stuff like that that gets me, even though the, you know, the special effects are not necessarily amazing, it just it’s the concept of it and and yeah I write stuff like that you know.

EA: You write what horrifies you.

CMR: Yeah.

EA: You write what horrifies you, and yes, that’s why I’m able to do body horror, because I watched the worst parts of The Human Centipede at an impressionable age and just … Not that you’ve seen too much of it, but I do write stuff similar to that I’m just like horrified of myself while I’m doing it. But I can’t stop. Like a purging.

CMR: Is that your – is that your medical horror thing that you were writing?

EA: Yeah.

CMR: Oh God. Okay, I’m excited for that to make its way into the world and also terrified.

[laughs]

FRL: I think that’s the general feeling I get when reading Ezra’s writing. It’s like, I want to read this. This is going to be horrifying.

[EA claps]

CMR: Yeah that’s … that’s how I feel.

So I was thinking we could do another kind of fun thing, which is to pick somebody else’s story from the anthology and talk about that, and why we like that. Frank! What have you chosen?

FRL: I was thinking about Hester’s story, The Hitchhiker.

CMR: Yes!

EA: Yes.

FRL: It nails all, I mean similar notes to what we’re talking about, this idea of like infection, or if more subtle in terms of like… well I won’t go too much into it, because I don’t want to spoil it, but a sort of creeping sense of like, oh, change, and shall we say compelling or impulses and then you’re like, Oh, is this really me, is it really not me, and it’s all getting weirder and there’s a fascinating and bizarre tone to the story and contains like a biological aspect, and I will not say anymore, but it’s like Oh, this is generally really cool and interesting and also terrifying.

But yeah it’s I mean the entire collection is full of great stories so yeah. This is one that is like oh good God.

EA: The way that it’s written so bouncy, like you don’t expect it to be like that, with the content you’re like Oh, this is like – you like – Hester pitched me the whole premise for it, so I was like Okay, this is going to be written like sort of you know, dark and really disturbing, but the whole piece of it is very bouncy.

AP: I loved all the pieces in the anthology, and Gunslingers and Garlic by L. J. Thomas stood out to me in particular, because vampire stories just never get old, and they have this ability to mutate and adapt to different eras and times, and this story brings vampires into our modern world again, where the dialogue is funny but let’s not forget that garlic is, as the story tells us, a very serious thing.

CMR: Yeah and it’s a real cool noir vampire story that’s also quite funny, and has got some really cool Southern Gothic-y elements in it, I think?

EA [talking under CMR]: Yeah, that one’s Southern Gothic.

CMR: What one have you picked Ezra? I know they’re all like – it’s kind of your entire thing’s your baby, so sorry.

EA: Yeah, I don’t know which one I would pick because they’re just such a vast array and everything is so different and everyone’s put bits and pieces of themselves into it and each have their own very specific voice and I don’t… I don’t know.

CMR: It’s unfair to ask you as well, because you’re meant to be the neutral impartial editor who’s chosen them all, and you’ve spent a lot more time with them all, more than anyone else has, because obviously you had to read the initial submission and kind of do the comments on that and then select and then…

EA: I read it probably about 13 times.

FRL: Whoa.

CMR: Yeah, and then you had other people do beta readings between your comments and developmental edit comments, which is by C. J. Listro, and then the copyediting was by Charlie Knight, so yeah we… and then, then you read it all again after everyone put their comments back in so. It was just  a whole process.

EA: And I never got tired of it. Someone else’s stories… like, it’s a lot easier to read through other people’s work than it is my own, over and over.

CMR: I was, I was going to mention Michelle Tang’s On Reflection, because that was one of the first ones that I read, I think. It’s the first one in the book as well. I love the voice and I love how Edgar Allan Poe it kind of is even though it’s contemporary and it’s just I don’t know if it’s the setting and the whole tragic love thing and a man just kind of slowly unravelling to the point of you know. He’s… he’s slowly sinking into suicide as as that’s, that’s the content warning at the start, but it’s that whole journey that he goes on in such a short space of time, and it really did kind of have those Poe vibes for me and I just… yeah I really liked that in a very disturbing kind of a way.

It’s just been such a fun experience to do the whole anthology and I was just wondering how like… Because it was a total accident, I think wasn’t it, that you didn’t… I mean the theme originally was just kind of something dark and spooky. and as you were choosing them and they kind of all fell into this transformational theme didn’t they, so they’re all kind of loosely linked by a change of state or resistance of change and transformation and destructive changes that people go through, and mortality as well, facing mortality is a big thing.

And I just wondered if we could have a little chat about… Why is that? And change and transformation in general, and what that means in your story and the stories you read or enjoyed. Go as shallow or deep as you want, I guess.

Allie, what about yours regarding ghosts? What’s your opinion about ghosts, do you believe in ghosts? And like, how did you come to write a ghost story, why was a ghost story important to you?

AP: Often I ask myself, what is a ghost, and how the idea of what a ghost is has changed for me. And I think it’s something that can survive past the physical body, and interacts – begins to interact with us, and that’s when we see all these odd things that might feel inexplicable, or like magic, just because we’re trying to look at them through too narrow a lens, I think too traditional a set of beliefs.

So we start to look at whether or not consciousness is, you know, localised perhaps in just a physical part of the brain; whether it can survive past the physical body after it decomposes, and can it interact. So if that is true, if potentially that’s what ghosts are, then it brings me to the conclusion that ghosts can be ‘real’ it’s just a matter of asking ourselves what they actually are. So, depending on what your set of beliefs is, ghosts are kind of those dark spaces in our explainable existence, and they are how dark thoughts can creep in, as well. And hence, um, the creativity, as well. So, that’s my take on ghosts.

And this being an anthology on mortality, memory and transformation, makes it all the more relevant as a theme if we consider ghosts being some sort of energy attempting to mutate and transform in order to make itself known, and keep memories alive, and giving the silenced a voice.

CMR: Yeah, thank you for that Allie, that’s so interesting. I really like ghost stories, and I really like that moment just before death, you know, that – the, the facing mortality moment, where you’re not sure if you’re going to transform, or you’re not sure what’s going to be on the other side, and that sort of thing.

Alice Scott’s story in the anthology deals with that a little bit as well, The Death of Christian Pacey, and that’s really cool, that has a trans MC, a trans man main character. And it’s just, yeah, a really interesting look at Alice’s characters, and the mythology of that world. It’s a contemporary story, and it’s really cool. I can’t think of anyone else who has a ghost story, a proper ghost story, in it. Everybody’s haunted by something, though.

Ezra! What about you?

EA: I guess with writing my own like I knew from the beginning that… redacted and redacted were going to die. So it’s like I wrote out, knowing that this was the end, like it’s pretty clear for me from the get go what the story was going to be beat by beat. But I don’t know that I really thought about it too deeply, like not thinking, like, in the back of my mind thinking, Okay, I have to have these sorts of themes in it, it just… I just sort of wrote it and it happened.

CMR: Do you find yourself writing, I know you find yourself writing about death a lot of because a lot of people die in your stories and but yeah I was just wondering if, like you also wrote about transformational kind of body horror as well, like you write vampires you write eldritch transformations and that kind of stuff and when did that start for you, like what attracts you to writing those kinds of things?

EA: I guess I’ve always been writing that like since I was like, preteen just because, I don’t know, I guess it’s always – the whole aspect of being closeted and queer, and knowing that when you come out your family won’t support you with that, so that you start to feel a little bit monstrous. And as you’re going through these changes that are difficult and there’s a lot of self-realization and I guess I just sort of connected with the monsters that were going through these things more than I connected with the main characters.

CMR: Yeah it’s like that the recognition of the outsider, isn’t it, like, actually that’s me.

EA: Yes.

CMR: Yeah, definitely, I can see that. Yeah I think that’s a very common experience, it resonates with an awful lot of people, I think that there’s so many people who love the idea of the Monstrous Divinity anthology that you’re currently managing the Kickstarter campaign for, and so, if you go to @EzraArndtWrites on Twitter and the link will be in the transcript (here) which is on the blog as well, but you’ll be able to support that and have a look at that anthology premise and what’s going on there.

Frank, do you want to chime in about transformation?

FRL: Sure. I think in my case, like it’s somewhat similar because I think I started out with like with this visual image of like Okay, I want to play with this thing, but I want to also want to make it mine so, I think there was this shift of like Okay, how do I build this as a character and then, as I, I think it came first with the, the pursuer, in this case, and just, the setting that I was making, like Okay, I want to make this awful human being, and then the things that he did, and his refusal to acknowledge that throughout the whole story.

It’s really interesting because the story changed a bit over the various editing and it got, ha, it got some added content warnings and an extra gruesome scene. I think at the end of day it was for the best because you really nailed down like Oh, this is all this going on. And I think in terms of transformation like it’s very much, well, a weird pursuit in the in both a strange creature or being that is sort of enacting this chase along with a sort of refusal to change it and understand like Oh, why is this happening Why am I, being pursued and, at the end the strange results too, which is well it’s something particular as well is not exactly oh it’s just this it’s it’s… trying to find different words. But it’s not as simple as just oh it’s a transformation or a change it’s that but it’s also something else, and I think it’s a change which isn’t as easy, especially when playing with a horrible person under a weird eldritch being.

But that I think it’s something that isn’t as easy to understand, like something which remains in a sort of tension as like the ending kinda does that it’s not as simple an ending, so one reading you can have is that it’s resolved, but I leave a couple of crumbs there that it’s not that easy.

And I think for me is that, like Okay, what do these do? What does this transformation entail which isn’t just ‘okay this happened’, but this entails more, and that more is something that I might play with somewhere else. It is something that I might do as a potential submission for the Monstrous Divinity thing, which is very cool, I’m really excited about it. It’s definitely going to play something along those lines of like, how can power be played and how does that change the character, the environment, the beings of the characters or the lives involved so.

I think you’re right when you’re mentioned the power thing about me and what I’m doing, and I realized it, but yeah I think it’s how that causes change and is affected by other types of actions and changes and leads to very much unforeseen consequences.

CMR: That’s so cool, I love how everybody’s got different ways that they approach transformation and that kind of, you know, coming from a political standpoint or class standpoint, or you know. And then metaphorically transposing that into something else and playing with it, I think I kind of do that as well, because I play with class dynamics a lot.

And I also play with monstrousness a lot and embodying monstrousness a lot and I think for some of the same reasons as you guys do.

But, for me, I don’t know like I think, because it took me so long to do that self-realization self-actualization kind of thing and I’m not when I grew up in the 90s, when we didn’t we may have had labels for things, but if we did I wasn’t aware of them, because I wasn’t in those circles and I wasn’t online and I wasn’t…

You know I came from a South Wales valley school, I think there was like two people openly gay and the whole school and both of them were lads, you know, and it was it was. It was just one of those things that you don’t think about. And I don’t think about… you know I didn’t ever think about my gender. If I felt something I didn’t really have the way to – the words to articulate it and you know not also not knowing that I’m neurodivergent until I was like in my 30s and that kind of thing.

So for me, I often felt I guess that I’m in a constant state of transformation and that kind of process, and that is very much linked to my class. I’m from a working class background and I went to university at Oxford and that was, you know, where people have titles and people are from public school and people are the sons of earls and that’s just a fact and being a working class academic is an interesting thing.

And you do get that kind of, that playing with who am I, where do I come from and how do I navigate all of these changes and all of these different pressures?

EA: Mmhm.

CMR: And I think that’s where… that’s why I do both things; like that kind of monstrousness. Which is, you know, some of my characters happen to be gay or happened to be pan or happened to be like whatever and that’s all canonical – um, aro-ace as well, kind of like me – but the actual locus of monstrousness tends to be a class thing for me. And embodying those different spaces and being forced into those spaces, or being forced out of those spaces or trying to muscle your way into spaces that exclude you, or not, you know, or whatever, and it’s that kind of thing that I find more … you know, that I play with more.

Yeah, it’s interesting isn’t it, how everybody’s got these different… is coming from different places, and then we all kind of merged into this like here, here’s a theme, and there are so many different layers to the theme, I love it. It’s just such an interesting anthology in that respect I think there’s so much going on.

But yeah Thank you so much guys.

EA: Thank you for having us.

FRL: It’s a great collection with great stories, incredibly edited and put together and just like yeah. Thank you. Thanks again Ezra for all your hard work.

CMR: Yeah, thank you for all your hard work and I’m really excited to see how the Monstrous Divinity anthology goes, and please do support that on Kickstarter if you can and follow Ezra @EzraArndtWrites on Twitter and the link will be in the transcript on the blog and on my Ko-Fi.

And that’s all we’ve got time for! Bye now.

Podcast S02E20 ~ Thirteenth Part 20

Welcome back to Eldritch Girl…

Ricky and Wes learn the extent of their powers in the Outside and must decide what to do with them; Katy hatches out, and Grandad’s priests show up.

CWs: deconstructive body horror, insectoid creature swarm, creature gore

Listen nowChapter 13

They hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for a full day, or at least Wes hadn’t, and Ricky had thrown up. That made everything harder. Wes was bone-tired; he stumbled over loose stones, over his own ankles, over nothing, dragging his feet as sweat prickled through his pores and drained him of any moisture he had left. He couldn’t go on much longer.

“The thing that’s bothering me,” Ricky said eventually, in an ominous voice that made Wes groan, “is…”

Wes waited.

Ricky didn’t finish.

“Is what?”

“What?”

Wes tried to swallow, dry-mouthed and irritable. “The thing that’s bothering you is… what?”

“Oh. Yeah. Priests. Haven’t seen any.”

“Fuck me.” He was probably still hallucinating or something. “Thought I saw some nuns over that way, we can have a chat to them if you want.”

“Don’t be daft, you soppy tart, I mean Grandad’s priests, don’t I? The ones I can summon.”

Wes scowled. “Since when can you do that?”

“What d’you think I had those tattoos for, before I shed my skin? Decoration?”

“Well… yeah.” Wes hoped they could keep the bickering up, it distracted him from how rough he was feeling. He was certain the cocoon was getting heavier. “That’s what they’re usually for.”

“I’m bloody wasted on you.”

Wes smirked. “Nearly there.”

“Yeah, but it’s like things are hanging back on purpose. Maybe it’s not because we’re with the Thirteenth, like I thought. What if it’s Him?”

He could hear the capitalisation in his cousin’s tone, but it wasn’t entirely respectful. Wes empathised.

“I don’t want to see Him.” He was starting to feel sick. False bravado pushed it down. “He can bloody well give me my face back, if He does show up.”

“Three single births together on this side,” Ricky mused, gruff and quiet. “Why’s that, then? I heard Grandad in the Throne Room, goin’ round in my head like a bloody answer machine. What’s he want with us?”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“Said something about me breaking another curse: opening up a portal for ‘em is my guess.”

Wes went cold. “Don’t you bloody dare. I mean, we can’t have an apocalypse now, Uncle Ray’s just finished his barn conversion.”

“Would you listen to yourself?” Ricky’s sneer was audible. “Bloody barn conversion.”

~ C. M. Rosens, Thirteenth, pp. 380-81

This is one of my favourite exchanges between Wes and Ricky, and it pretty much encapsulates the differences in attitudes between them, and Wes’s upper middle class aspirations. (Just because Wes has money doesn’t make him upper class: he doesn’t have the breeding or the background for that sort of social mobility, he only has the money for the lifestyle, which is something that doesn’t translate across cultures I’ve noticed).

I loved writing this last act mainly because I got a lot more of the banter in, but also because I got to explore the current dynamic and what it could become in future interactions. I also enjoyed the subversion and parody of some Weird tropes and making it more like a Weird sitcom or soap opera, since this whole concept – Pagham-on-Sea and all its inhabitants, not just this one family – was conceived in a soap opera way. I like the idea of introducing a lot of characters and families and entities, and then following them through different spin-off series and shorts, but this family proved the most interesting to me, so it’s the one I’ve started off with.

I’ve said in interviews I’m not really into Cosmic Horror for its own sake: I don’t find that compelling unless there’s a micro-hook, some character arc or interaction I can get behind and follow.

Hopefully I’m achieving this!

REad along

Podcast S02E19 ~ Thirteenth Part 19

Welcome back to Eldritch Girl…

Katy’s metamorphosis begins, Ricky takes a risk that leads to a bad trip, and Wes finds himself assuming responsibility.

CWs: consuming non-edible hallucinogenic/toxic substance, discussion of sexual relationship between cousins, deconstructive body horror (while conscious).

LISTEN NOWChapter 12

The moon found another break in the clouds and lit up the landscape in eerie silver, glancing off the strange shapes and hard edges, throwing off his perceptions with deeper contrasts and longer shadows.

“What were you looking at, earlier?” Wes wanted to know. “The things you thought were eyes?”

“Nah, I don’t know.” Ricky sucked absent-mindedly on his hand, pried from the cocoon’s sticky outer membrane.

Wes leapt over and smacked it out of his mouth. “Don’t do that, bloody hell, you’ve no idea what that stuff even is!” He rolled his eyes. “You know some species are toxic, right?
To protect themselves from predators?”

Ricky giggled. “Don’t put me off.”

“That’s…” Wes rubbed his own hands ineffectually on his jeans. “Just don’t. If you start seeing fucking bats everywhere, don’t come crying to me.”

“I’m an ascetic, don’t mean I don’t know how to handle the odd trip.” Ricky paused and Wes watched the familiar expression of mild confusion slip over his face as his eyes unfocused briefly. “Cor, actually. I do feel weird.”

Wes groaned. “Oh, perfect.”

Ricky sat down heavily, frowning. “On reflection,” he said, staring at his hand, “that may have been a mistake.”

~ C. M. Rosens, Thirteenth, pp. 360-61

This passage contains my direct Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas reference (This is BAT COUNTRY) and I do use F&L as a comp for this in terms of tone and Wes being off his face for the majority of the novel.

This isn’t a drug-fuelled search for the American Dream, obviously, it’s more a drug-fuelled search for the upper middle-class dream, which Wes is always going to be locked out of because he never went to the right schools, he doesn’t have the right background, and money in those situations doesn’t matter as much.

While Wes is social climbing, Ricky’s main issue is that he’s spent most of his life repressing a lot of memories, and genuinely thinking nothing before he was ~21 years old doesn’t count. That’s his headspace in The Crows, when his POV confidently asserts “He’d never spent 3 nights away from the cottage before”, which is challenged by Carrie in this book now she actually can access his memories and the house’s memories of him. He’s also spent a lot of his life repressing the past and escaping the present, or focusing on the future, so now he doesn’t know how to enjoy what he’s got in the present. Most of Ricky’s issues in this book are him realising this, and that he still doesn’t really understand what Carrie-Fairwood does/doesn’t like him doing.

With Katy around dredging up memories of his own teen years that he’d rather not bother with, his interactions with Wes just compound the latent insecurities, so he’s started to regress/relapse. Also, there is an actual reason for him doing this particular thing which you find out in a short while…

Read along

Podcast S02E18 ~ Thirteenth Part 18

Katy, Wes and Ricky begin their exploration of the Outside, but Wes isn’t the only one to be affected by the atmosphere in this other dimension.

CWs: body horror, family-context aggression, thinking of people as objects, blood/accidental cut (superficial).

Listen NowChapter 11

Wes was out in front, making the balancing act along the outcrop look easy. Katy made the mistake of looking down, at the sheer drop to a narrow ledge the other side, the slope below that littered with loose coal-black scree, the yawning fissure ending the incline abruptly with a sudden drop into nothing.

She wanted to be in between the boys, in case one of them pushed the other again, but she hoped Ricky had a little more dignity even if he had enough spite.

Every now and then, they’d look back to check she was following. It was getting hotter. Katy realised this when her mouth was dry and her top was plastered to her back, nape
prickling with sweat. They had nothing to drink.

Carrie’s kitchen felt so close, but there was no way to get there.

“If anything comes out of this hole I’m feeding you two to it first,” she muttered, sticky and irritable.

“Noted,” Ricky called over his shoulder, and she flushed, not knowing he could hear that well.

Every inch became leaden effort.

~ C. M. Rosens, Thirteenth, p. 339

In this section, Katy is struggling with what she is and what she is becoming, which you can read in a number of ways if you want. She is also trying to figure out her cousin’s relationship with her brother, and trying to work out her own place in the world.

Thirteenth takes place over a few weeks in January, rather than over 33 days (the timeline of The Crows). Everything is claustrophobic and intense, and the forced proximity of Ricky and Wes, who don’t really have much to do with each other unless Wes wants a reading, skews their perceptions of things by bringing up a lot of memories they don’t normally think about. This is exacerbated by having to relate to a 17-year-old girl they’ve ended up babysitting, which makes them both recall what it was like for them at that age.

Ricky’s sexual experiences as a teen were few and far between, never when sober, and all (?) involved Wes in some way (in The Crows the first time he was spontaneously aroused was age 15 in a voyeuristic situation watching Wes with Layla). This was also his only time of spontaneous arousal, implying that while he was up for experimenting when drunk/high, he was never really sexually attracted to Wes during that time and it was a purely physical response to stimuli. Ricky’s unreliable way of recalling his past by leaving things out is echoed in the way he tells Carrie he never spent 3 nights away from the cottage before he stayed with her, and she points out this isn’t true. What he’s done is cancel out everything prior to around age 20/21, when he fully adopted asceticism and sobriety, so nothing before then counts.

As for Wes, who at the time felt Ricky led him on, this isn’t as important anymore. All it did was show him that Ricky can’t be trusted in personal terms. What’s worse in his view is that Ricky sold him out to Grandad for a shot at the shrine, and turned him into the invisible man, which Ricky refutes. So there’s a lot going on, and Katy doesn’t have a clue about most of this context as she was too young at the time and Wes had already moved out of the house.

The dynamics between them here in these chapters are very new for all of them, because they are all in a situation where they can’t check out, leave, or have a mediator/buffer. They’re thrown together and have to work together, and that means having to get to know each other more, or at least having to examine what they feel about this.

I love this trope, but I don’t like easy resolutions, so don’t expect everything to be wrapped up in a “chosen family” quite yet…

Author Interview with Ally Wilkes

Author BioAlly Wilkes: Photo Credit Sophie Davidson

Ally Wilkes (she/they) grew up in a succession of isolated—possibly haunted—country houses and boarding schools. After studying law at Oxford, she went on to spend eleven years as a criminal barrister.

Ally now lives in Greenwich, London, with an anatomical human skeleton and far too many books about Polar exploration.

Twitter: @UnheimlichManvr

Website: allywilkes.com

listen nowIntroduction

CMR: Well hello, and welcome to the next episode of Eldritch Girl, and I’ve got Ally Wilkes with me, author of All The White Spaces which is coming out soon. Ally, it’s lovely to have you, would you like to introduce yourself?

AW: Hi Mel, it’s so lovely to be on the podcast, and a brief introduction to me, I am a former criminal barrister turned horror writer. I’m coming to you from Greenwich London, which is where I live, I am an absolute nerd about polar and exploration horror, that’s my passion, and also in terms of sidelines I’m the book reviews editor for Horrified Magazine, the British horror magazine, and I’ve also had a few short stories here and there in various magazines and anthologies.

CMR: That’s fantastic, and you’re going to read an extract for us that was exclusively published with Horrified to begin with, so in the transcript that’s going to be linked to the Horrified Magazine extract instead of having it reproduced in the blog and I’m really excited because I started I started the ARC [Advanced Reader Copy] and I’m getting through it. It’s a chonky boi, I really like it.

AW: It’s my very large son, I’m afraid.

CMR: It’s really, really good so I’m very glad that you’re able to to read the extract for us. Whenever you’re ready, please do, and if you want to contextualize it and introduce it that’s also fine.

AW: Sure, so the extract is from the novel’s prologue. I know prologues come in and out of fashion, but I like them, so my novel does have a prologue. And the scene is Portsmouth in England in December 1918 the First World War has just finished. And our protagonist Jonathan Morgan has just received in us that his two older brothers have died from their battlefield injuries and wanting a moment alone with his thoughts he had upstairs to the boys’ bedroom.

Extract: ALL THE WHITE SPACESclick to Read at Horrified Magazine A vivid ghost story exploring identity, gender and selfhood, set against the backdrop of the golden age of polar exploration, All the White Spaces is out in January 2022 (UK) and March 2022 (US) from Titan Books.

Content Warnings here: https://www.allywilkes.com/general-8 Interview

CMR: I really love that opening. I love that prologue so much. I really loved the imagery as well that kind of really struck me when I read it first was the jewelled ice of the flows and the jagged blue ball of Antarctica, that was just gorgeous in this really stunning visual and I think we’ll get on to the kind of the emotional intensity of it as well, but I was just thinking what drew you to this particular era and why the Antarctic, rather than the Arctic, in this case? Because you are interested in the Arctic as well.

AW: I’m into all things polar and historical exploration, yeah. In this case, the era and the Antarctic went hand in hand I’ve always had a sort of lifelong fascination with the heroic age of Antarctica and the stories of, you know, Scott Shackleton and all those chaps.

And it’s sort of it came from a very, very early childhood interest in the continent, you know the stage at which you’re sort of lying on your stomach in your bedroom paging through atlases and what’s that, what’s there, and I found this place at the bottom of the globe that was called Wilkes Land, and that very much appealed to me with a child’s zeal for seeing my own name in print. And I was lucky enough to have a father who encouraged my reading very, very early on, and I sort of grew up loving the classic adventure stories, you know the sort of, Boys’ Own sort of heroes stories of their era, very much of that era, of course.

And then, as I grew older and older I started to appreciate, for example, the classic photography of the era like Frank Hurley’s photographs of the Endurance expedition have gone to a number of really good exhibitions based on that and also the photography and the iconography of those abandoned Antarctic huts, which are, of course, perfectly preserved and perfectly eerie.

So when I was thinking of what to write, I knew that it had to be around the heroic age of Antarctica to really pique my interest, but of course my novel is sort of almost post heroic age, because the heroic age is normally taken really to have ended with either the First World War, or with Shackleton’s death in 1922 on the Quest expedition, and so what I wanted to present was a sort of imagined tail-end to the heroic age, seen through the prism of the First World War, and there was this wonderful sort of like, little evocative nugget that sort of really sent me down this rabbit hole.

And it is the introduction by Fergus Fleming to my very dog-eared copy of Shackleton’s South and it’s just this one line, I think it says, “the concept of heroism died in the trenches.”

And it’s just the juxtaposition of this age of heroes, with, of course, the horrors of World War One and the sort of machinery of conflict that developed out of that. So I just wanted to smash the two of them together and create a sort of last hurrah for the heroic age or or maybe I don’t know a love letter or an Elegy for it either.

CMR: I love that. I think that’s very powerful, the melding of the horrors of the war is done in a very subtle way like it’s very explicit but … We don’t go to war, you don’t start us in the trenches you don’t you start us in a drawing room. And it’s very much the emotional effect and the impact of loss and that deep psychological scarring and those sorts of traumas and compounded bereavement and national grief as well and that sort of but very much focused on one particular character, one particular family, and then you get to meet Harry in person who’s the best friend of the brothers who comes back and I don’t want to spoil it too much, because it’s not out yet, but people will love him I hope.

AW: My tragic boy Harry.

CMR: Yes, and he’s so he’s, obviously, the one that has been through the war has lost all of his friends has lost so much of himself as well, I think that’s fair to say, you know, and he’s going on this expedition to Antarctica with Jonathan.

I was interested in what drew you to use a sort of grief, bereavement, as the catalyst for you know the propelling action in the story, and I wondered if you wanted to unpack that kind of without spoilers, but like, the impact of that sort of collective trauma of the War on the men on the expedition, and how that helped you to develop their characters potentially or how that helped you to develop the psychology of what’s going on, and as we kind of get further into the horror of things on the ice.

AW: Well, grief and bereavement as a catalyst really sort of came organically out of the fact that I wanted to do a post First World War Antarctic setting. And exactly the same sort of people that would have been at the Front would be the people on the expedition, so they would have obviously be an instant overlap. And I thought it was very interesting that everyone on that expedition would have been profoundly touched by the War in one way or another, whether they went or not, because you have a few people on the expedition: one who was a conscientious objector, one who was turned down for military service and volunteered elsewhere, and they’ve all been touched very profoundly by the War and it’s sort of it’s made its mark in their psyches. So it was very… it was natural for me to use it as an inciting incident for Jonathan that the thing that kicks it all off because it’s clear that when the story starts, Jonathan is sort of his… he’s very much stuck in a rut. He’s very much trapped by his circumstance, partly because of the gender he was assigned at birth, because Jonathan is a trans man, he was assigned female at birth. Partly because of societal expectations related to that gender, partly because of expectations related to that class. He’s clearly from upper class background, his family are very obsessed with propriety and so on, so he’s… he starts the story very much almost a fly in amber, as it were, and something has to come through and crush him out of it and incite him to make all the choices he does, and some of them are, you know quite wacky choices, like let’s run away to Antarctica! Yes, that will be brilliant! Spoiler alert, it is not brilliant.

So something had to happen and it had to be from, to my mind, the death of his brothers, no other thing would suit. It couldn’t be people who are further from here, more or less bound up in his life because it needed to have that sort of sucker punch really at the early stage of the book.

And also because Jonathan’s entire deal at the start at the story is about him idolizing his brothers and hero-worshiping them, he’s built them up into this almost this construct in his mind of what masculinity and heroism might mean. And as the story unfolds, he sort of comes to unpick that and understand, maybe, their nuances in a bit more depth and by doing so, understand what he thinks being a man is all about, the sort of man he wants to be, so he couldn’t very well do that while they were still in the picture… so I’m afraid, Rufus and Francis, you’re dead to begin with, let’s move on.

CMR: Yes, because you’ve got that kind of exploration of self and that reconstructive power then, haven’t you, the demolition of things that have gone before. And I think that line is really important, like at the start, and I picked it up at the time I read it for the first time, and then you read it out loud and it it kind of hit me again, which was “a man is entitled to leave his past behind”, or something that? And that’s very much like, here’s the main theme!

AW: Oh wow, you know, I’m very glad you you picked up on that. I have a bit of a foible when I approach either a prologue or a first chapter and I like to put as much of the book as I can in by hook or by crook, and I hope it doesn’t come across as overloaded as as a result, but I do try and sneak in the themes, sneak in some of the major incidents, sneak in all the characters you’re going to need to know about really early on.

And that line from Liam Clark, who is Randall the superheroes second in command and often overlooked is really sort of key to the thesis of the book a man is entitled if he wishes, if he wishes, he doesn’t have to leave the past behind. And Jonathan has to make that decision to build himself in his own image, not in the image of his brothers and not in the image of the past.

CMR: Yes, and if he wishes, is very much about your own agency in that as well, and like being able to have that agency and yeah I was like oh! Excellent. Yeah and I’m thinking about the white space of the title, and the white space of Antarctica is that kind of metaphor that ability, that place of exploration, that enables you to do that, because you can be anybody on a completely blank sheet of continent where it is actually just you in the ice and there isn’t any … well, or is there… it’s you and particularly vicious penguins or terrifying horrors.

AW: I mean the “all the white spaces” thing was sort of a bit of serendipity on my part. So, the book, when I was originally working on it, was called A Great White Darkness and I liked that as a title. It felt very dramatic, but it didn’t feel quite right emotionally for the book. It didn’t feel like it spoke to what the book might be about, and it’s also very close to the title of a fantastic YA novel called The White Darkness, which is in Antarctica.

So I didn’t really want to use that, but my novel writing group helped me sort of pick that title from one Randall’s very early rants to Jonathan. And it just sounded just so perfectly right for its time period, all the white spaces, and, at the time I was actually writing a diary format, so the idea was that Jonathan was sort of constructing his identity and story in the margins of this traditional heroic tale, and that corresponds to the white spaces of Antarctica.

And even though I ditched the diary format, I hope it still works, because the gulf between what said, officially, so to speak about someone and who they really are is a major preoccupation for me in the novel.

CMR: Yes, I think I think it does work. I really enjoyed going on that journey and I’m wondering… So why did you choose Jonathan’s character, what kind of made him jump out at you as, this is my main character, and how much research did you need to do and what kind of research did you do to try and bring him to life?

AW: Well, the fact that Jonathan was a trans character, a trans man fell into place really early on, for me. And because I wanted to tell a story about a sort of very masculine environment, the trenches and Antarctica, and give it a little bit of a little bit of an elbow a maybe a little bit of a critique, and so I knew I needed an outsider voice.

But someone who yearned to be on the inside and felt it was really their rightful place so that, for me, sort of excluded the traditional girl dressed up as a boy adventure narrative which I really loved growing up, but I felt I wanted to do something a little bit different and once I had that in mind, I felt Jonathan’s identity as a trans man brought out so much about his character and his struggles and also the way he relates to the other men on the expedition.

So to me it was really key that he was the character, I chose for my window into this world because he could critique it and he could speak to it was not being you know boots on fully immersed into it just yet and in terms of the research, I mean it was quite difficult in a way, because around that time it’s 1920s and ‘trans’ wouldn’t be a word in general currency, so to speak, and Jonathan certainly with his upbringing wouldn’t really be able to describe himself as such.

I started off before I wrote the book looking at other queer identities around that time period, including gay men and books about trans men or those sorts of narratives around the turn of the century, and how those people articulated their feelings about their identities and who they were, and what I found actually was that they were quite matter of fact about who they were and their desires and their identities and their wants, and people around them could also even in the stranger settings sometimes be quite accepting and quite matter of fact, as well, they wouldn’t have the modern terminology to display.

Perhaps a very rounded understanding, but sometimes people will surprise you, in terms of what they will accept tolerate and generally just get on with, and so I wanted to bring that sort of down to earth matter-of-fact-ness to Jonathan’s story and I worked at a very early stage before submitting to agents, with three separate sensitivity readers for trans men and trans masculine identities, to try and get that sort of hopefully authentic and real-seeming portrayal whilst very much bearing in mind that it’s a book about a trans man, rather than a book about being trans per se – that’s not really Jonathan’s journey.

CMR: Yeah absolutely and I think that’s like an important distinction, but I think it yeah I I enjoy Jonathan’s voice a lot and I can see how – I know that you’ve said you started off in sort of diary story format, I can kind of see how it would have developed from that sort, I can see how it lends itself to to that, but I really love the narrative voice and the flow of the narrative.

And I think it really works yeah and I can’t wait for other people to read it, so I can say more.

AW: I think starting it as a diary did really helped me because I wrote a lot of it as a diary like the entire first draft, diary only, 80,000 words. And it really helped me sort of inhabit jonathan’s voice and make all those sort of quite niggling decisions about whether he would use this word or the other word, whether he has a sort of floated fancy language or whether he’s resolutely down to earth and God love him I love Jonathan but it’s very funny when he walks out of, say, a terrifying location, he comes out into the polar night and it’s often you as a writer want to really sort of paint the picture, but inside I can hear Jonathan going … “It was dark, and cold.”

CMR: It’s like that almost anticlimactic like – [trills, increasing pitch] splat.

AW: Exactly. What he would say, and the frames of reference, he would have, I think, and that that is much easier to do I think if you start off writing it as a diary and then transpose it, as I have into a sort of, first person more traditional narrative.

CMR: Yes, yeah yeah. I’m thinking about other kinds of research that you obviously have done that you’ve been immersed in since you were a child, because the Antarctic, as it yeah [on the map] behind you… Is, I mean, some seriously weird stuff has happened in the Antarctic anyway and there’s lots of really interesting stories of biological things and just very bizarre kind of narratives, and lights and illusions and perceptions and that kind of stuff, and I was wondering if, you know, how much of that did you develop and put into the story, and what did you leave out that you kind of wanted to put in which I imagine is like everything.

AW: In terms of what I put in, All the White Spaces at its core, I think, is largely inspired by the narratives of Shackleton. In particular, his insurance expedition it’s around the same time period insurance was at the start of the First World War, it involves a disaster in the Weddell Sea, and there’s a young stowaway in search for adventure, as there was on Shackleton ship; Perce Blackborow, the Welsh galley assistant, and so I really sort of took that as a starting point, with the research and tried to be very focused on the heroic age and that time in Antarctica and that region of Antarctica and not sort of go off on a flight to fancy and all down a wiki hole to do with anything else.

I took Shackleton as a starting point, obviously, but I’m writing a world in which he didn’t exist because I think that if you’re writing a historical novel where there’s one preeminent person around at a certain time in a certain place, you’re going to have to grapple with… either you put them in the novel and deal with that, as you will, or if you… if you want to have a second explorer who’s a little bit like that, they might have to meet or have some sort of history, and I didn’t want that, so I tossed all of that out to create Australis Randall and to give myself a little bit more leeway and then really sort of focused in on fleshing out everything that he might have gone through in his life. But there’s a lot of stuff about Antarctica that I very much enjoyed and had to largely leave out.

Really interesting accounts of killer whales hunting the men from the expeditions on the ice floes, ganging up on them and trying to kill them and their dogs and their ponies, and so the descriptions given are just terrifying, absolute — on Scott’s expedition talks about their yellow pig-like eyes, and it’s it’s all very, very frightening and I came to the conclusion I couldn’t use any of that, but you do see references to killer whales here and there in the novel because I just couldn’t stop myself.

And, and then my other great exploration loves are scurvy, and which I regretfully concluded I couldn’t shoehorn into the novel it’s already a very chunky boy indeed, and survival cannibalism which obviously looms very large over Arctic exploration.

Not so much Antarctic so again, I had to put that to one side and be very deliberate that we weren’t going to have, as it were, a dwindling stores plotline or scurvy sores plotline.

CMR: Why, why is it that there’s more survival cannibalism in Arctic rather than Antarctic what’s what’s that about?

AW: I don’t know it might be due to time periods and equipment. And in Antarctica exploration, it tends to be at its pioneer age slightly later. Because when you think of survival cannibalism in the Arctic, you’re really sort of hitting a peak around … with the Franklin expedition, with Greeley and stuff like that, so I don’t know whether it’s something to do with the time period or whether there’s just something in the water up there.

It seems to be a very bad place for survival cannibalism, but we don’t really have that sort of the same degree of stories in the Antarctic. I’m not even going to comment on the Mawson controversy, because I’m not qualified, but it’s an interesting one.

CMR: Oh, yeah. Yeah, people can Google that one. Come to your own conclusions.

AW: In terms of what else I would have loved to have done a nod to in the book, there’s a lot of very cosmic shit happening in Antarctica you’ve got things like the Blood Falls, which is just so heavy metal, which is like a waterfall that runs red like blood. You’ve got things like the Wilkes Land gravity anomaly, which is a place where satellites get pulled towards the earth because there’s a massive deposit of something like meteorite and they think under the snow and ice and so you’ve got all this sort of strange UFO conspiracy theory stuff going on with Antarctica and that’s that’s all fascinating and I would have liked to have included more nods to it in the book.

But, again, I was trying very deliberately to evoke the feel of a certain place and time that certain heroic era, I didn’t think I could fit it all in, so look out for 1940s/50s cosmic Nazi Antarctica book.

CMR: I was gonna say yeah. I am actually looking forward to that now. Like tiny bit of survival cannibalism tiny, tiny bit??

AW: A morsel!

CMR: Yeah that’s fantastic, I’m really excited!

And when is it [All The White Spaces] coming out do you like to do the big … it’s so very soon, this month [January].

AW: Yes, that’s right all the white spaces is out in the UK on the 25th so a week today as we’re recording this and in the US I’m afraid US readers have to wait a little bit longer it’s the 29th of March so that’s when it will be on sale.

CMR: So 25th of January UK and then March for US. I think this episode will probably go out in February. So, right in the middle of the two, so actually by the time this podcast airs. But I still won’t be able to spoil it for US readers because they have to wait a whole other month.

AW: Yes.

CMR: Is there anything else that you’ve got coming up, or any author events that you’d like to mention or anything with Horrified Magazine that you want to bring up while you’re here?

AW: In terms of Horrified Magazine, we are still going strong, that was launched is you probably remember during some pretty wild times for us with covert and various other things, but still going strong. I’m still book reviews editor over there, we specialize in British horror, we really want to champion British horror, particularly indie horror, and sort of shine a spotlight on it, because one thing about the horror scene is it can come across as really quite US-centric so trying to trying to diversify that as much as we’re able to and I’m also in the starting line-up of Cloister Fox, which is a brand new British weird and speculative fiction zine, the first edition is going to be out in April.

It’s going to be bi-annually after that at time of recording. Our Indiegogo campaign is still going to help us get off the ground.

But it’s going to have some seriously weird fiction from speculative and slipstream writers which is going to be in the first issue, so I’m working on that at the moment.

And finally, as you can probably imagine, there is a book to in the works, and it’s no surprise it’s more historical horror set in cold places. This time the Arctic and this one really takes that scurvy and survival cannibalism just runs with it. It’s a book all about scurvy and survival cannibalism.

CMR: YAY!

AW: I know, right?

CMR: VERY excited.

AW: Yeah the second I realized I couldn’t fit it in All the White Spaces, I was like, hang on buckle up, we’re going in.

CMR: Good. Good choices. Except by, I’m assuming, most of the characters in the book.

AW: Terrible choices. Terrible choices. None of most of my characters could make a good choice if it hit them in the face.

CMR: Excellent. Excellent. Well it’s been absolutely lovely to talk to you. I think that’s all we’ve got time for, but I yeah I really enjoyed listening to so much Antarctic goodness. Thank you so much for that.

AW: Thank you so much for having me on it’s been an absolute pleasure.

Podcast S02E17 ~ Thirteenth Part 17

The Triad find themselves trapped the wrong side of the portal with an unexpected benefit for Wes.

CWs: fist-fight, blood, disordered eating/mindless eating to painful over-capacity (of rotten food)

LISTEN NOWChapter 11

Wes gave a loud shout and nearly cannoned into him, forcing his sister to duck down.

Ricky turned.

Something was emerging from the sea, the water running off its hide as the waters boiled around it. He scowled. ‘Boiled’… he was starting to sound like Grampa Nathan.

But that’s what it looked like – the waters bubbling and foaming, churning up around the hulking shape as it rose in a hump of mottled seabed hues, bilge-brown, shark-grey, silt-black. A bulging eye, which he judged to be the width and length of his own torso, opened, two sets of eyelids blinking vertically and horizontally.

Ricky inhaled the amphibious stink.

“Cor. That’s a bloody big frog.”

~ C. M. Rosens, Thirteenth, pp. 327-8

This is the act of the novel where I got to play with my favourite classic Weird stories, and the main one was Dagon by H. P. Lovecraft. The volcanic rock island and, later, the appearance of Grandad, are things I took from that, but also a family of eldritch horrors are not about to be cowed by actual Old Ones or anything else, so Katy tries to take a photo of it on her phone.

Ricky is guided through the landscape by recalling the journals of Grampa Nathan, who was a human before he met Miss Deirdre Wend and drinking Beverley’s tea. The refrain “Don’t drink the tea” in The Crows makes more sense when you know what it does to you.

The lovely heart-warming (/sarcasm) tale of Nathan Montague Porter and Deirdre Wend, a domestic tale of Weird happenings and body horror, and not enough fade-to-black tentacle sex, is published in THE UNCANNY AND THE DEAD.

Amzn UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B09QP22ZCT
Amzn US: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09QP22ZCT

eBook: https://books2read.com/u/4jPYL5

Podcast S02E16 ~ Thirteenth Part 16

Welcome back to Eldritch Girl…

The final act of the novel is upon us, and in this part, Katy returns to the Outside unprepared and Wes seizes his chance to get rid of Ricky.

CWs: incision/self-mutilation, drug-addled decision-making, aggressive family arguments, body horror.

Listen nowChapter 10

Memories crowded him, bouncing against the dark sand.

One of them stood out among the rest, looming closer.

Charlie, on her knees with a utility knife in her hand, slicing off her own eyelids so she could stare hopelessly at a collage of his photographs until she starved to death. She’d wet herself rather than leave the room, rather than leave the pictures of him.

“No, no, baby, no…” Wes whimpered, reaching for her, but he never wanted to touch that memory again. “I thought if I left, you’d get better…”

The memory replayed from when he walked in the door. He spun around, looking for other memories, but there was only that one, replaying like a gif wherever he
looked.

“No, no…” He closed his eyes, but it played on the back of his eyelids, and he couldn’t switch it off.

Regret oozed out of his joints, slowing him down as he tried to run, and just as he collapsed in a heap of broken, numbed parts, everything twisted into a different shape and he was still strapped into the passenger seat of his car, his brain inside out, thoughts sucked back inside.

It took him a good ten minutes and another bottle of mineral water before he dared unbuckle the seat belt.

“Fuck, I’ve got to stop taking these.”

There was too much darkness in him, too much he never wanted to remember either backwards or forwards.

~ C. M. Rosens, Thirteenth, p. 319

The standalone backstory of this memory is its own short, and also its own episode:

Blog post : >>here<<

Podcast episode: >>here<<

Ko-Fi Shop link: >>here<<

eBook Stores link: >>here<<

Amazon link (change .co.uk in the URL to your Amazon store): >>here<<

GoodReads Page: >>here<<

THE CROWS Hardback Editions!

Click to go through to Amazon and get the eBook, paperback, hardback, and/or audiobookBOOK BOXES

Pricing: £65.00 total
~
£45.00 per box
(on their own, hardbacks available on Amzn for £23.99)
+
Shipping
£20.00 per box
(shipping worldwide from UK)

https://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/
Prices in GBP ~ use the xe tool to convert

Book boxes are coming soon to my Ko-Fi Shop and will include:

Signed hardback copy (contains a town map by Dewi Hargreaves, 5 illustrations by Thomas Brown [same as paperback], an exclusive short story “Gerald” only available in the hardback and for monthly Ko-Fi subscribers, and a new cover design by Rebecca Kenney.) The message can be personalised: message me on Ko-Fi.
Assortment of story-related handwritten notes ~ you can ask me some questions on Ko-Fi if you like and I’ll add my answers in too! I can also annotate your favourite chapter in the book itself, or on note cards if you want a pristine copy. Message me for your preference and if you have any themes, characters etc you especially want extra notes on.
Limited edition scented candle (choice of EITHER “Fairwood House” [Early Grey Tea & Lavender] OR “Pagham-on-Sea” [Sea Spray & Peppermint].)

I had hoped to get them ready for 31 Jan 2022 but the hardback author copies can only be shipped by Amazon to Germany, France, Spain and Italy, so I’m having a wonderful German friend receive the order and then ship them to me, via them. Delivery solutions!! This does mean there’ll be a slight delay in the copies arriving, so I’m having to push back the estimated date the first 4 boxes will be available to the first week of Feb 2022.

There will be a total of 14 boxes over the course of the next few months available to buy, and if there is more demand (and it’s financially viable for me), I will see what I can do after that.

HOWEVER – if you don’t want a box but you DO want a hardback on its own, you can order them directly from Amazon right now for £23.99!

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